Introduction
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"Gregory! Cleaning!" another untimely shout came from the first floor.
"Right now! Just a minute!" Greg answered again without taking his eyes off the monitor.
If no one has broken into his room so far, then the case can wait. At least until he finishes this comment. Or the next one. After all, there's always someone wrong on the Internet!
"Gregory King Vader, if I don't see you downstairs in five minutes, I'll be very angry!" The tone of Mrs. Vader's voice took on a menacing hue, prophesying heavenly punishment on Greg's head.
Greg grimaced as he leaned back in his chair. Not that he was that busy, but distracting him from sifting through the PHO forums for the sake of some sort of cleaning was at the very least undignified on his mother's part. It would be Christmas in a few days, and no doubt another torture of cleaning would only kill the atmosphere of the impending holiday.
He had already reached for the closing icon of the browser window when the monitor suddenly faded to opaque black. The system unit's humming coolers let out their last gasp and froze motionlessly. Greg lethargically stared at the silenced hardware, then flipped his flat clicker over in the hope of seeing the red LED glow. In vain.
"Mom," he shouted, taking the very tone that could be heard through several walls and ceilings, "Five minutes haven't passed yet!"
"No, young man, but they are near the end!" came from somewhere in the kitchen. "So is my patience!"
"Then why did my computer suddenly shut down?" A couple of tones lower, Greg asked, not really hoping for an answer.
"The power's out! The TV doesn't work either, and "Friends" is about to start!" came the answer from the kitchen of the all-knowing oracle that Linda Vader sometimes seemed to be to her family.
"Аh. Beautiful." Greg gurgled, sliding down the seat. Not only was he going to get harnessed to clean up the mess, but there was no telling when the lights would be back on. The last time a battle of the capes had caused several of the power poles to collapse, leaving their neighborhood without power for days. And the whole time he felt like a caveman.
Pulling up his sliding shorts, Greg stomped down to the first floor, turning toward the kitchen. Cleaning is cleaning, of course, but his stomach was starting to get a little hungry. And dinner must still be a long way off. His mother was just trying something on the stove, blowing the contents of a hot spoon, so Greg's insides immediately gave off a long horn of gourmet agony.
"Dinner will be in an hour, sandwiches are on the table. The sponge and water bowl are there, too - dust your room." Linda said, without letting him get a word in edgewise. "And get the Christmas decorations; they need to be cleaned up, too!"
"Uhu. Yeah. Yeah, of course. I'm on my way." Greg muttered to himself. Sometimes his mother's supposed omniscience, along with her commanding tone, drove him mad. But at least she made sandwiches. There was a lot to be forgiven for that.
"By the way, I hear everything!" Another shout from the stove reached him. How does she do that? Maybe his mother really is a secret cape.
"What about me? I'm nothing." Greg answered, shoving two slices of bread with tuna sandwiched between them into his mouth. At least it wasn't sardines. "I'm on my way, see?"
Clutching the bowl with one hand and balancing the sandwich with the other to keep the stuffing out of it, he began the arduous climb back to his abode. He kicked the door open as usual and slid inside, chewing hastily. After setting a bowl of water on the vacant space on his desk, he began to clean up, carefully smearing dirt and dust over all surfaces as uniformly as possible.
After a while, when the system unit, the windowsill, the table, and a couple of shelves had rid themselves of some of their age-old dirt, and the water in the bowl had acquired an indescribable hue and richness of almost ready-made biological weapons, Greg threw the sponge back into the container and looked around. He didn't notice much difference from the previous state of the room, contrary to Linda's opinion, but he did realize that he'd reached his cleaning limit for the next six months.
All that was left was to get the box of jewelry. From the attic. A very dark attic, filled with all sorts of junk that had been piled up there since the Civil War.
"Beautiful, just beautiful." Greg grimaced. He could certainly remind his mother that there were no lights, and he wouldn't see anything in the damn attic. But she'd probably think he was just afraid of the dark. He's not. Well, almost. A flashlight wouldn't hurt anyway.
Armed with a flashlight that had been lying in the closet since the last blackout, Greg stepped into the hallway and turned right. There was a thin chain hanging from the ceiling, ending in a dusty tassel. He jumped up and grabbed hold of it, and then a piece of ladder dropped from the ceiling with a heartbreaking creak. With a shrug of the cold that ran down his spine, Greg grunted as he climbed up.
The attic greeted him with the expected darkness and a cloud of dust dancing in the flashlight beam. Among the neatly and not so neatly stacked piles of junk, which it was a shame to throw away, there was one single, unsightly box to be found. Logically, it should have been right next to the stairs, as the most sought-after component of the attic's contents. But, of course, it wasn't there.
"Great. Now I'll be looking for her here for the rest of my life.' Greg muttered to himself. The silence of the attic swallowed up his words like a black pool of a hapless diver.
Placing the flashlight on the edge of the hatch, he climbed up, shaking the dust-stained hands off his shorts. This action stirred the stale atmosphere, causing more dust to enter the air. The beam of light from a picked-up flashlight did not so much dispel the darkness as illuminate the dust, behind which numerous boxes and furniture covered with dirty white cloths could be seen in vague silhouettes.
Greg looked around for the familiar box from years past, but there was none in sight. There was a mark on the floor at one point that resembled the size of the object he was looking for. But judging by the layer of dust, it was left over from last year. Of course, he could go back and say he hadn't found anything, but then he could be seen as helpless and disorganized again. And then his mother would go upstairs herself, as usual, and retrieve the object from the most unobvious place, giving Greg one look of reproach for not looking hard enough.
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With a heavy sigh, Greg coughed, sending more gray clouds into the air. If he was allergic to dust, he would have died on the spot in horrible agony, but thanks to his resourcefulness, he managed to escape by pulling a T-shirt over his face.
As far as Greg remembered, the front of the staircase was a more recent pile of junk, mostly from his family. While behind it was the ancient junk left over from the house's past owners. He used to have little interest in some old people's junk, but from the height of his present consciousness, he could surmise the presence of real antiques there. Well, or just ancient junk that wasn't worth a dime in the best of days.
It was very unlikely that the box of Christmas decorations would end up with the old owners' things. So Greg left them alone, heading toward the piles of new junk. Among the old cabinets and broken chairs, interspersed with boxes of memorabilia, broken appliances, and crates of pickle jars, it could take a long time to wander, and it would take forever to dig through them. Half an hour later, however, Greg was convinced that the box he was looking for was not among them. Or it was so well hidden that it was impossible to find it without knowing its exact location.
The only thing left to do was to look in the corner of the house with the really ancient junk from the previous owners, and that was just to clear his conscience. Greg was tired of the dust and the need to breathe through a layer of cloth, but it wasn't in his nature to quit in the middle of it. So he staggered reluctantly to the pile at the other end of the attic.
Even the light of the flashlight seemed to grow dimmer among the antiques, and it wasn't the fault of the dead batteries. Perhaps it was the time-yellowed sheets that covered the furniture, but the place itself gave an unsettling impression that made Greg shiver.
As he stepped between the fabric-wrapped, jagged forms, he couldn't shake the feeling that one of the silhouettes would turn out to be a monster ready to lunge.
"I should watch fewer horror movies," he muttered to himself, peeking under one of the sheets. A squinty chair without a seat was no match for a monster.
Past the broken dining table, the stack of cardboard boxes with the stacks of thirty-year-old magazines, and the torso of a mannequin on a stand, Greg approached the chest of drawers. The huge four-panel closet defied the laws of physics, for getting it into the attic without dismantling the roof was clearly impossible.
After a fruitless look around, he proceeded to search the chest of drawers itself, opening one door after another. Almost all the compartments were empty, except for the shelves of half-faded rags that had once been clothes, and a few stacks of newspapers dating from the middle of the last century. In the section on the far right was a tattered red wig with a comb tangled in its strands.
Greg was about to leave when he noticed a metallic glow behind a pile of waste paper. Curious, he pushed aside the yellowed newspapers and found behind them a small plywood suitcase upholstered in a plaid fabric that had frayed with time. Despite the poor state of the upholstery, the metal padding of the lock gleamed as if it had been made yesterday.
Curious, Greg pulled the suitcase out of the niche and tried to open it. However, despite his best efforts, he could not even lift the locking plate. Either it was jammed, or there was some secret. Once more trying to move the plate to the side where it seemed to move more readily, Greg only succeeded in scratching his finger bloodily on a previously inconspicuous part of the mechanism.
"Damn it! Aw, shh..." He hissed in sharp pain, sending his injured finger into his mouth. Meanwhile, something clicked inside the suitcase, and the lock, which had taken so long to open, lifted the lid by itself.
Greg was so surprised by this that he forgot the pain. For a moment he thought, wildly, that his blood was the key to the strange lock. Of course, that couldn't be true, for no one, not even a particularly crazy cape, would put a genetic scanner or something like that in an ancient plywood suitcase.
He lifted the lid with his healthy hand and peered inside. There were two stacks of books, bound with twine, and with them some sacks, packages, and jars. He opened one of the books and flipped through the pages, becoming yellowed with time, but it was rather difficult to read in the dwindling light of the lantern. Although the title was quite intriguing - "The Burning of the Unburnt God".
He did not want to leave things in the attic that he had literally bled for, so he went downstairs with an open suitcase in his hands. Going down the stairs with his hands full was not easy, but the natural light helped a lot, so the flashlight went into the suitcase. Putting his load on the floor near the stairs, he pulled his T-shirt off his face, which looked more like a floor cloth from the dust covering it, and went down to the first floor.
"Mom, the box of decorations in the attic isn't..." Greg froze mid-sentence as he watched Linda pin the angel figurines from the very box he'd spent nearly an hour searching through the dusty junk for on the curtains.
"What are you talking about? We keep a box of decorations in the pantry under the stairs. Dinner's in the kitchen, eat it while it's hot. And change that creepy T-shirt, for God's sake, it looks like it's been washed on the floor." Linda commanded nonchalantly, not taking her eyes off the decorations.
"Okay, Mom." A huffing Greg grumbled weakly and trudged off to the kitchen. At least he'd found something interesting and passed the time until dinner, but it still hurt. She'd told him about the attic, hadn't she? Or... hadn't she? He wasn't sure anymore.
After tossing into his mouth what he thought was lunch, a mixture of meat casserole and vegetable stew, Greg tossed his T-shirt into the laundry basket and trudged upstairs, deliberately ignoring Linda singing Christmas carols. There was still no electricity, but there was a suitcase waiting on the floor, beckoning with the undisclosed secrets of antiquity. This was a temptation that, in the absence of the Internet and the opportunity to play on a console, Greg could not pass up, and so with renewed enthusiasm he went inside.
The inside of the suitcase contained a dozen books in thick covers, with titles he had never heard of before. One of the volumes had a thick leather spine with bright shiny metal upholstered corners and the same clasp. It was someone's diary, judging by the handwritten text, with surprisingly good handwriting and highlighted dates, but Greg put it aside for the rest of the suitcase.
The dark wood box, with its burnt-out pattern of tongues of flame and strange symbols resembling hieroglyphics, stood out among the other items. The box was even more remarkable for its lack of any trace of a lock, which did not prevent the charred wood from remaining tightly closed. Greg could feel the weight shift in it as he shook it, but no sounds penetrated, indicating that the contents had been carefully packed.
There was also a short metal tube with a screw-on lid on the far side of the case. With some effort, Greg managed to open it and ended up with a pile of charcoal sketches depicting surreal scenes. Also in the suitcase were several sacks with some jars and paper rolls inside. The names written on them didn't say anything, though the notation "Vitality Pigment" allowed Greg's guess that it was some kind of paint. A few brushes in the woven bundle only reinforced that assumption.
A quick glance through the scattered stack of sheets at the bottom of the suitcase, which was either an essay or an outline of a magazine article about some "Knock Mysteries," made Greg a little bored. Not that he was counting on any treasure, but the contents of the ancient suitcase could have been more mysterious... Where were the amulets of bones, the Indian talismans with the scalps of unsuccessful settlers, the bloody, sharp iron of uncertain purpose?
After putting everything but the books back in the suitcase, Greg sat down on the bed, which had been cleared of the piles of clothes. The books were strangely eye-catching, even though they didn't shine with a modern colorful design. A cursory glance through each one, searching for abstracts and content, revealed some common features: each book had a small stamp on the inside cover, depicting some object in an incomplete circle with dashes, and many of the text itself hid entire underlined paragraphs, complete with marginal notes.
Putting aside a couple of the most promising books, Greg opened the diary he'd left behind. There was no trace of the owner's name on the cover, the spine, or even in the highlighted space. Which was somehow incongruous with the extreme neatness of the entries. There were no inserts, stickers, or anything else inside either, except for a few dozen pencil sketches. The diary entries suddenly cut off on October 4, 1904, leaving a few blank pages for the rest of the book. With a shrug of his shoulders, Greg made himself comfortable, and, exposing the biography of John Doe to the light pouring in from the window, began to read.
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A couple of hours later, as the short winter day drew to a close, Greg was still lying on his bed, exposing the Diary to the last rays of light, only his former relaxed state was gone.
His stringy body was covered in a clammy sweat, his hands trembled nervously, and his eyes gleamed frantically in the twilight, trying to decipher one more line...
Finally realizing the futility of his efforts, Greg carefully closed the last page he had read with a scrap of paper and clutched the book to his chest as if it were the most precious treasure in the world. He had no recollection of the lantern, and his blood-curdling lips, which had not uttered a word in hours, bore only hoarse breathing for some time.
"It all never quite fit together." Finally, he whispered. "But now, now I understand."
Anger boiled up in Greg's heart. He'd spent so much time sifting through forums and open-access research papers, searching, asking stupid questions, as it was clear now. So? And what!!! The world brazenly lied to his face! And yet everyone so admires all these "heroes" without even knowing what exactly is behind them. All this crap about triggers and crowns in the brains of the "Chosen Ones" about whom no reliable information can be obtained. Lies! All lies! That the whole world believed...
"But they can't hide everything without a trace. No, they can't! The truth will leak out anyway!" There was a furious whisper in the darkness. "Let the Internet work, and I'll show you all!"
A few minutes later the room was filled with the deep breathing of a restless teenager who had not let go of the priceless tome even in his sleep. Linda, who had not waited an hour later for her son's supper, was just as unsuccessful in retrieving the book that had been clutched tightly in his hands. With a shrug, she covered him with a blanket.
And no one living knew that on that very day, the paths the world would take had changed forever.
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